


In a Hunger-Pang Frame

by raven_aorla



Series: Don't Be Shocked When Your Hist'ry Book Mentions Me [14]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda, Real Person Fiction, Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Gay Bar, Gen, Misgendering, No Sleepy Hollow characters appear, Not from Alex and gets called out, Pairings only referred or implied, Polyamorous Character, Queer Character, Research, Trans Male Character, brief BDSM reference, discussion of polyamory, historical hamilton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 21:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6487444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raven_aorla/pseuds/raven_aorla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex sipped his beer and ran his fingers through his hair like he was trying to comb memories away. "I'm recently 'out' and have come here to observe a social framework I previously had no opportunity to join. If I may beg your indulgence, I have some questions."</p><p>"I get that. Safe spaces aren't just for hooking up. Ask me anything." He could do this. Loy Fongsi, real adult, could be honorable in the face of dire attraction to dapper silver foxes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In a Hunger-Pang Frame

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Gement for beta, and for the line about performative masculinity (among others).

So it had been going well. Loy approached a guy he hadn't seen here before, bought him a drink, established that his name was Max and he was an Army officer. Loy kind of had a thing for American military personnel, so sue him. 

Then he tried moving from ingratiation to outright flirtation, and Max looked down at him and drawled, "Sorry honey, I'm only into, like, _actual_ men."

Loy went cold. Then hot. "You could have turned me down without being a dickhead about it. You...you _kwai._ You _heah_. I hope you step on a Lego barefoot while sleepy."

The bartender cleared her throat and pointed at Max. "Take a walk."

"I'm not the one slinging Chinese insults!"

"They're Thai insults, _jao gnoh._ " Loy felt like he was vibrating. 

"Don't make me tell the manager about this plus the other two regulars you've antagonized this week." Won Soobin was as good at looming and growling during her day job as she was in the, ahem, other context Loy knew her from.

"Fine. Place is dull as dishwater anyways." The slime withdrew.

Loy pulled up a barstool and slumped his head on the counter. This early on a Wednesday, there were only a handful of others around, and he didn't want to see if they were all looking at him. "Thank you, Baroness."

"If you want to call me that, do so when you come over and I can flog you as much as your little heart desires. I'm working right now. Use my name." Won Soobin was the only bartender here who wasn't a white cis dude. She'd probably gained the position out of sheer ferocity. He would have preferred to stop by during her shifts even if they didn't know each other so well. Some of Loy's best friends were white cis dudes, but he preferred not being the only person around who wasn't one.

"Sorry, Soobin." He lifted his head. "Heyyy, vintage wine over in the corner. Pour me a really, really masculine beverage and wish me luck."

Won Soobin rolled her eyes. "Loy Fongsi, you are irrepressible. Make sure you're actually calm first. I know what it's like. Hell, I swear at misgendering bigots in three languages. And then I'm ready to go to war with the next person who so much as looks at me funny, no matter how hot they are. You want to taste that wine, let it breathe."

Mr. Vintage Wine had commandeered one of those stilt-like tables with the chairs that made Loy feel like his parents should come strap him into. By the way he hooked his feet onto the chair rungs to avoid dangling his legs, it was clear the man was not that much taller than Loy. Nice legs. Very nice legs, in dark blue skinny jeans. His sports jacket matched, in a not especially fashionable but very tasteful cut. His shirt was a violet button-up with a magenta pocket square. 

The clothes were a delight, honestly, but Loy was more impressed by how the man was writing very quickly in two different notebooks. In fountain pen. Two or three sentences in one and then the other. 

Then the man looked up at him. Gray hair and sharp features, even though his chin and cheeks had been softened by age a little. As a young man he must have practically sliced the air with his face. He had odd indigo-y eyes like a manga character. Or that actress Loy's mom liked. Elizabeth Taylor. 

Selfless bodhisattvas and all the heavens, the man looked _hungry_. Not for food, though he may well have missed more than a few meals over the years. He looked like he had never gained enough truth, or achievement, or peace, or praise, or love. In his life. Like his life was governed by pangs.

Okay, some of Loy's wild musings may have come from his already-turbulent feelings and romantic nature. He tried not to squeak (the hormones did only so much for him, unfortunately). "You're wearing the bisexual pride colors. Did...did you know?" Loy had contemplated dressing in pansexuality colors for a party once, but he disliked wearing pink and yellow at the same time.

"I did. However, you're the first man to mention it." The man considered his notebooks for a moment. He closed one of them and tucked it into his satchel. The other remained open. His hand stayed poised for more writing at any second. "I'm amenable to conversation if you will enlighten me as to what you called Max. His advances towards me before your arrival were uninspired at best."

Loy put his drink on the table next to the man's obscure craft beer. In direct, but affectionate, dismissal of his request, Won Soobin had given him a bottle of hard lemonade. She knew he liked it when he was a tad fragile. "They weren't as severe as could have been. I need to keep worse ones in reserve for worse times. I called him a water buffalo, a monitor lizard, and a fool. 'Monitor lizard' is bad enough that some Thais use euphemisms for the animal itself in polite conversation. About the same as 'son of a bitch', maybe? The other two are more childish."

The man put his pen down, though he still had fingers curled around it. "I'd not previously investigated what animal comparisons might be especially potent insults from language to language, which was clearly remiss of me, and I should add it to my future topics of research. I didn't catch the entirety of your curse upon him, either."

"I don't know if you've ever stepped on any small children's toys in the middle of the night, but of all, I think the Lego blocks are worst. My youngest niece manages to leave many tiny ones at the top of the stairs every time I visit. Now I suspect, maybe on purpose? That one wasn't cultural. Just experience. My name is Loy and I like you. There was supposed to be a smooth movement from my story to my announcement. Um." 

"Alex." He reached out his hand and offered a firm business handshake, which didn't look natural on him and didn't fit the bar; he must be playing from a rulebook he didn't know very well yet. "Don't apologize overmuch for eagerness and sincerity. I prefer it to all these calculated attempts to gain favor."

After all these years Loy still had trouble with the letter "x", but flirting favors the brave. "Nice to meet you, Alek. Sss. Alex. Yeah, pickup artist types wear me out. Blunt cruising for hookups is frequently impolite, often objectifying, but direct communication culture saves a lot of time and confusion."

"I would imagine so." Alex was dodging the fact that he hadn't understood something Loy had said. Loy knew that facial expression well, mostly from explaining his occupation, though occasionally from relatively rare attempts to detail his personal life. 

Loy clasped his bottle in his hands like a talisman. "I am so sorry. Here I go assuming you're both a native English speaker _and_ familiar with a specific type of slang. Jargon. One of those. Which isn't fair. Not that your English isn't amazing, poetic, like there is the poetry right there, but I do the same thing where I use long sentences with big words hoping people don't notice that I'm struggling with colloquial. Though if you are a native English speaker I might have just deadly offended you. Mortally offended."

"It occurs to me that if I told more new acquaintances that I grew up speaking French but attended college in America, it might make them wonder less at my distinct difficulties with current idiom. You haven't offended me, son."

Loy replied as gently as he could, because yes, this was a pet peeve, but Alex was being so nice about Loy's own missteps. "I will interpret the 'son' as friendliness, but I'm thirty-eight years old. I know I don't look like it. Just in case, I want to also mention that if daddy kink is your thing, that's fine, but it's not something I go for." 

"Lord, what have I become? I am apparently condemned to treat others with the same condescension at which I would bristle. I apologize. In the spirit of the forthrightness you have offered, quid pro quo: I have no desire to 'pick up' or leave this establishment with any companionship." Alex sipped his beer and ran his fingers through his hair like he was trying to comb memories away. "I'm recently 'out' and have come here to observe a social framework I previously had no opportunity to join. If I may beg your indulgence, I have some questions."

"I get that. Safe spaces aren't just for hooking up. Ask me anything." He could do this. Loy Fongsi, real adult, could be honorable in the face of dire attraction to dapper silver foxes. If he couldn't help with the hungers for love or pleasure, feeding Alex's desire for knowledge was worthwhile too. He avoided making a double entendre about indulgence. Or begging.

It turned out that Alex had done a ton of homework and had multiple pages of questions in his open notebook. Loy made sure to first explain the terms he himself had used earlier, then gleefully let Alex take the lead. 

What were the distinctions between bisexual and pansexual identities, and were such acknowledged as acceptable in this ostensibly 'gay' bar? How about transsexual, transgender, and nonbinary variants? Did the local community consider drag and cross dressing part of that range or utterly distinct? What was Loy's opinion of acronyms in activism, as a member of the oft-neglected T contingent? Where did sexual orientation and romantic orientation overlap? Diverge? What alternate terms for non-heterosexual individuals were considered offensive, which were more affectionate, and by whom? How could people engage in polyamory without it ending in tears?

Loy answered each question as accurately and concisely as he could, with disclaimers on the limits of his expertise. Then that last one gave Loy pause. He glanced at Alex's hand. No ring or tan line, but that had been a hungrier question than the rest. "Since we are being direct, I'll just ask. Do you have a partner at home, probably a straight woman, and the two of you haven't worked out whether to open up your relationship to other people? And maybe you're here to see if enough fish are biting to make it worth trying?"

Alex bought himself some time by draining his beer. "I admit to having enjoyed the attention, even during a more sedate hour of business. In truth, I'm recently widowed."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Loy ached for him, having to lose someone before he found himself, and now unable to share that self with the lost one. "Did your spouse know?"

There was no need for clarification. "She did, but it was... We weren't in a position to discuss it in any depth. We lacked the words that would have allowed for much of the conversation. There was a man, before I met her, and we carried on after the marriage with her blessing. But we were soldiers, and it was necessarily silent. Not that our comrades didn't know, but..."

He paused, his eyes far away, but he clearly wasn't done. Loy practiced patience and left a listening silence to let the words fall in. "She wanted my happiness, and I wanted her happiness, and I was terrified that, should both I and my lover come home alive, it might be impossible to achieve both."

Okay, Loy had walked into a minefield on this one. "And then you never got to find out?"

"Correct."

"I am so sorry." If they kept going like this, Loy was going to start crying, and the man with the suddenly glistening Elizabeth Taylor eyes was going to start crying, and then Loy could never show his face in this bar again unless he wrestled a wild boar to restore his performative masculinity cred. "I need a glass of water after all this talking. You want one? Be right back."

When he returned, Alex was staring into space. He'd taken a thin gold chain out from under his shirt and was holding two linked gold rings that hung from it, running his fingers over their curves, snapping them together into one, pulling them apart again. "I hurt her in a number of ways. None intentional, but all preventable."

If only it had been remotely appropriate for Loy to ask if he could hold the nifty puzzle ring. He squashed the magpie impulse down to the same place as his desire. "Sorry to hear that too. If she knew you loved her, at least, that counts for a lot. Did she?" 

"Yes." 

It was dark outside the windows now, and the crowd had doubled. Alex was wise to begin his education at the kind of gay bar with a pool table and a battered jukebox, rather than the kind with pounding music inside and reliable opportunities for oral sex by the dumpster out back. Loy used to like the latter type in his twenties, but, you know, middle age. He'd always prefered oral sex in a well-lit bedroom anyway. Over the course of the evening Loy had increasingly needed to lean towards Alex to hear him, which wasn't the worse thing ever.

"My husband is alive, but..." Loy reached into his shirt and pulled out the his own thin gold chain with its cluster of symbols he never removed. "My wedding ring's on here because I don't like the feeling of it when I type. I type a lot, for work. Programming, encryption, things like that."

This led to a pleasant tangent about Loy's field. Alex had very little background knowledge but followed along well. He seemed most interested in the 'codebreaking' aspect.

"Well, it's a broad, vague...uh...noun. Sorry. Lost my thread. Though I do other things too, I'm primarily what's called a 'white hat hacker'. Hackers exploit security weaknesses in computer programs in order steal information, or money, or disrupt functionality. White hat hackers try to sneak past defenses for the purpose of identifying weaknesses. In a sanctioned manner. If I'm lucky I get my hands on heavy-duty encryption and instructed to take it apart. I get to break things so they get fixed better. It's like being an undisputed hero in a war on some new frontier. I love it. We were talking about polyamory."

Alex coughed. "I've no moral high ground to condemn the practice, despite a number of reservations with which I will not be so ungracious as to burden my generous guide. Such quandaries are not yours to resolve for me. On a pettier level, I admit to finding the mixture of Latin and Greek roots a trifle irritating."

Loy laughed. "Not my idea. Thai doesn't even have a word for it. Have you heard the joke about how polyamory is clearly wrong...on a linguistic basis?"

"I came across it in my researches and found it moderately amusing, yes." This led to another tangent that wasn't unpleasant to start with. Loy liked watching people, especially attractive people, expound enthusiastically about a given subject. Alex clearly had a lot of feelings about both the value of a classical education and the injustice that so few could access it, turning it into an arcane code that the wealthy could _[something something in English something English something something]._

"Um..." Loy's spoken English improved and sped up when he was excited and stopped second-guessing himself. Unfortunately, his listening comprehension didn't do the same when dealing with speeches from a wildly gesturing, oblivious conversational partner. When Alex didn't notice Loy's subtle interjection, he jumped right in the middle of a sentence about the evolution of legal terms over the past two centuries.

"Alex. Many of my classes at Chulalongkorn University were taught in English, but stuff involving dead European languages wasn't on the curriculum. Southeast Asia has its own set of ancient languages to argue about. I think you can talk to a lot of people other than me about these things. Not so many about polyamory. Not firsthand."

The look on Alex's face reminded Loy of a cat's expression seconds after walking into a glass door. After a moment he took a deep breath and said, "I apologize. I've been frequently criticized for fatiguing my listeners, and there is the added rudeness of overlooking the ways in which your background affects the impact of my words. Some of my recent friends have been particularly vehement on the latter point."

"Good for them," Loy said, trying to sound firm but not too serious. Alex had also probably been fleeing from the earlier minefield. "Forgiven. Where were we? Ah. I'm here like an idle fisherman who won't go hungry regardless, but enjoys sitting by the lake. Adrian - my husband - is on a business trip right now and literally ordered me to 'try playing the field tonight and stop moping'. Our long-term nonbinary partner, Georgia, who is sometimes Georg, is covering for a sick coworker. I'm the one who often doesn't work standard hours, which means I'm on my own a lot."

"When is Georgia 'Georg'?" Those eyes. Wanting to know. Made Loy a bit dizzy, even if he was voluntarily keeping things platonic. Most people's eyes glazed over after this much detail. Alex's just got keener.

"When zie feels that way. Zie always has to be Georgia professionally, though, which is upsetting. The heart-with-infinity-sign charm here is one of the polyamory symbols. Zie gave it to me. All of us have freedom outside our trio. Adrian is what's called my 'primary' because we prioritize each other. He's the one I come home to." Loy summarized a few other poly relationship structures he knew about. "There are many ways to love. Like how there are many ways to be."

As he talked, Loy considered showing Alex his wallet photos of the three of them being cuddly, which Loy often deployed as what he called his "poly passport" to prove he wasn't betraying anyone. Such sweetness and joy might be salt in the wound of Alex's bereavement, though. Better not. Instead he paused at intervals as Alex took notes.

"It sounds staggeringly complex," Alex said when he'd finished for now. 

"Heh. Sometimes. It's not for everyone, and even people who are naturally leaning towards that can have problems. We have to sit down and talk it out. Adrian would be so hurt if I formed a new long-term relationship behind his back, without introducing them to each other, it would be like an affair is for monogamous couples. Georgia doesn't live with us, but zie is the only person who can stay overnight in our bed rather than the guest room. It would upset me to have someone else in sleep in our little sanctuary. You get the idea."

"Is that an icon of the Buddha hanging beside your ring, as well?" That was a sudden swerve. Something in Loy's explanation must have touched a nerve, though Alex continued with his tone of barely-restrained curiosity. 

"Yes. Ironically I'm more observant than much of my family. Ironic to some. Buddhism, or the Thai variant, doesn't say much about the stuff Bible thumpers say I'm going to hell for. I know not all Christians are like that. I enjoy asking the pesky ones which hell I'm going to, since the hells and heavens are all part of the wheel of reincarnation we hope to escape."

"An exceedingly self-righteous woman I once knew claimed she could see the Devil in my face. Had she known more about my, ah, private activities, I wager she would have expired from outrage." Alex's amusement deflated as quickly as it came. "A shame, really. Except for her sanctimony and whatever illogic led to her choice of husband, she had a sharp mind."

"Lots of kind, intelligent fellow Buddhists have told me that I was born transgender as a punishment for something I did in a previous life." Loy held his Buddha figure briefly before tucking everything back down his shirt. "They don't think I should be treated badly for it. It still frustrates me every time. Most of the things about me considered 'sins' or 'defects' are only that way when people act like they are. I think every time you're reborn, it's so you can learn something new. Otherwise why would we run into the same few souls life after life? We are all fellow students in a... cosmic school. Hopefully we can build upon one another and the world, along with our own souls. That's what I believe."

"Does that belief give you comfort?" Alex's whole posture was so forlorn that Loy wanted to take him home to feed and cuddle. Saying so would be unlikely to go over well.

"I would say it gives me strength. I refuse to believe my life is some sort of penance for my past self. And if you live as though every person is someone you've probably met before, and will likely meet again, you're more ready to say hello. Less afraid of goodbye. Speaking of which." Loy checked his phone. "I need to video call my sister in Khon Khaen in the morning. The whole family will be having birthday dinner for her. They didn't want me to come to America. They'll all want to wave at the screen and I don't want to look too sleep-deprived or otherwise not well. I'm lucky enough not to be a black sheep, more like an odd stripy lamb that wandered off."

"That is luck indeed. I count myself fortunate to have made your acquaintance. Considering the wit you have demonstrated in English, I wish I had the facility to communicate with you in your native tongue." Alex actually, really, not-made-up-at-all, got to his feet and bowed.

Blushing, Loy dug through his wallet for a blue card, which simply said "Loy Fongsi", followed by his personal number and email. His business cards, with his much longer full name, were on white stock. "I will never make, um, assumptions, or, or advances, that you don't clearly state are acceptable. But if you think of more questions. Or want to pursue friendship. Here." He placed the card on the table rather than handing it over directly, the way a woman is supposed to give food to a monk so the monk is not tempted to touch her. 

He didn't ask for Alex's contact info in return. That would be pushy. Insensitive, even. The goodbyes proceeded in a standard, amiable fashion. Loy waved at Won Soobin on his way out. She was yelling at a new hire who'd slipped up on hygiene measures and slightly risked contaminating drinks. Something about how if he was so fond of having dirty hands, she should make him go dig a latrine with them.

Shortly after he got home, though, his phone lit up with a text. Unknown number.

_What literature do you recommend for further education on subjects we discussed?_

Loy grinned and shot back, _need2tellme whatyouread b4 :) text tmrw. gnight._

**Author's Note:**

> It isn't just text speak that makes him like this style - written Thai doesn't put spaces between individual words. Or names. Only between sentences. 
> 
> Don't dismiss friendly foreigner Loy Fongsi's beliefs out of hand, Alex...


End file.
